Professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Maryland, Panos A. Ligomenides is a life member of The Academy of Athens and serves as director of its Office of Research in Informatics and Electronics. His current research is focused on medical image processing for early cancer diagnosis, as well as applied artificial intelligence, cybernetics, cognitive engineering, and applications of artificial neural networks. After graduating from the University of Athens, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics summa cum laude and a master's degree in radio engineering, Dr. Ligomenides went on to Stanford University, where he earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering and took a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics in 1958. He subsequently worked as a research scientist at IBM laboratories in Poughkeepsie, New York, and San Jose, California, for six years and also taught at San Jose and Santa Clara universities. He joined the engineering faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964 and, five years later, the engineering faculty at Stanford, while continuing his association with IBM as a consultant. In 1971, Dr. Ligomenides accepted a visiting position as a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland. The next year, he was appointed to a tenured position as professor of electrical engineering and director of Maryland's Cybernetics Research Laboratory, posts he held until his retirement in 1993. Elected that year to The Academy of Athens, he returned to Greece, and for the next four years, he served in an invited position as professor of informatics at University of Patras. While teaching in the United States, Dr. Ligomenides served for a number of years as vice president of the Caelum Research Corporation and as president of the Computer Engineering Consultants Company. He was also an adjunct professor on the computer engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Throughout his career, he has been a technical advisor to private companies and public agencies in the United States and in Greece. In 1973, he was named an Outstanding Educator in America by the Organization of Deans of American Universities. He has been a Fulbright Professor, a Ford Foundation fellow, a fellow of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a fellow of the Salzburg Center for American Studies. Dr. Ligomenides is the author of more than 200 articles published in scientific journals and reviewed proceedings and of seven technical books. In 2002, The Apricot's Peel, his book on the ontological and metaphysical implications of recent discoveries in physics and information theory, was published in Greek.